As I am writing this, I have a container of Concord grapes sitting right next to me, and I am working my way through the whole damned thing because I *LOVE* Concord grapes. Unlike other varieties of grapes, Concord grapes only seem to be available “in season”, which happens to be NOW (actually, from about mid-September through mid-November). That’s too bad as far as I am concerned, because I would eat them all year ’round if they were available, and I don’t particularly care for the other common table grapes that are available twelve months of the year. And Alton Browns’ commercials notwithstanding, drinking grape juice doesn’t compare with eating the grapes themselves (although I *do* like grape juice rather a lot, too). Given that the Concord grape is the one most used in commercial production, you’d think they’d have found a way to have them as table grapes year-round, too, but maybe they don’t grow well in Chile or whatever Southern Hemisphere nation provides us with all of our winter fruit.
Those Welch’s commercials extol the virtues of the polyphenols found in grapes, but, as that link will show you, 90% of the polyphenols are in the skins and seeds of grapes, not the pulp. So, sorry again, Alton, but better to stick to eating whole grapes. One of the polyphenol compounds in grapes that has attracted a lot of attention in the last few years is called resveratrol. Resveratrol, apparently, has quite a few potential health benefits: it’s an anti-inflammatory, it helps control blood sugar, and can counteract the presence of fats in the diet.
So, since, as I have already noted once already today, there is nothing that can’t be used to make a buck, not only is Welch’s trying to cash in on that, but so are a ton of other products like dietary supplements and wine. Writing at the group blog True/Slant, blogger F. Paul Wilson points out the customary purveyors of snake oil trying to cash in on resveratrol. As always, it’s a combination of unsubstantiated claims and a lack of qualified research to establish what the actual beneficial levels of resveratrol might be. You sure as hell aren’t going to get a ton of benefit out of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or even drinking a glass of grape juice. Just the other day, I was given a sample of a candy chew that contained resveratrol, and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that getting your resveratrol through candy isn’t the best mechanism, either. The recent recommendation to drink a glass of red wine every day seems to be the most likely way to get some benefit, as does, y’know, eating grapes.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
